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Growing from a flicker to a flame

“The Silence is Deafening” Part 2 of 3

Hello again. I started this earlier, but it felt like… like it was enough. Too much, even. It’s hard to admit these things- hard to say that you didn’t know your next door neighbor’s name until she threw herself out a window, hard to say that you didn’t care. Even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true.

Right, so here’s the gist of the last entry: before my neighbor killed herself, I didn’t think that suicide, or more honestly, that my suicide would affect anyone around me.

After my neighbor killed herself, I wrote this:

The silence is deafening. She wasn’t in this class. I’m not sure if these people actually knew her, but it is still quiet. Like her voice echoed through the halls. Like it was her heartbeat that kept the people alive. She was never in this room with us, but she is missing. We know it. We feel it.

It was so odd to me. Surreal. The campus was mourning her, this one random student that no one had cared enough to invest in or connect with while she lived was now super important because she was dead.

It’s really strange to me that I’m angry about this. I mean, I am not even mad about her situation, not really, because I don’t know her situation. I have no idea who she was friends with or if she had friends or what clubs she was in, or if she went to the counseling center like me, or if she connected well to her family or if she had a family or anything. Because I know so little about her, it makes sense to assume that I am not angry about the events of her life. In order to be angry about this woman’s life, I would need a concrete event to react to, like watching a friend or family member check out of an emotional conversation or tell her that “she needed to get better faster”or something.

Instead, I’m trying to talk about the campus wide response (again), but this time, I’m just getting angry about something in my life. About how I felt so alone. About how the people around me let me believe that I could just fade away like smoke without affecting anyone. About how no one waded down into the fetid swamp that I lived in, just to be sure that I knew that I could never be too messy to love.